Tom Ligon wrote:Diogenes wrote:
Tom Ligon wrote:
Are you saying Trump, the master manipulator of the media, is scared?
"Scared" is also a derogatory insinuation, and it betrays a lack of objectivity regarding the man.
That was a question, not an assertion. You seemed to be making the insinuation. As opposed to you
asserting that Obama would now be in prison if the press had not been on his side. I'd ask you to defend that statement, but I'm not in a mood to listen to you report a bunch of made up bull you dug up on the internet somewhere.
I believe the Lois Lerner IRS tax scandal actually made it to the television system briefly, but with very little coverage. Also I think the Bill Clinton/Loretta E. Lynch meeting on the tarmac made a brief mention on the television system. I'm not sure if the pallet loads of money sent to Iran got on Television, because I don't watch those people. There has been a little bit of coverage of the gun running scheme to Mexico, and a little bit of coverage of the gun running scheme to the "Syrian Rebels", but none of this stuff received nearly the coverage it deserved.
Had the Bush administration done any of these things, it would be a huge scandal, and the world would be hearing about it non-stop 24-7-365.
And that is the primary power of the media weapon system. They can focus it on what they like, and they can deliberately ignore things they don't want the public to hear about. Ignoring the wrongdoing or the appearance of wrongdoing of their political allies has become SOP.
Tom Ligon wrote:
I'm not a fan of Obama, but if he were guilty of something like this, I'd expect Trump to be pushing for prosecution, as he said he would for Hillary, and didn't.
Obama is virtually immunized from prosecution. It would require exceptionally egregious and non-hideable offenses to be discovered on his part for anyone in the Justice Department to work up the courage to charge him with a crime. Because he is a Symbol, he is just not going to be held to the same standards as anyone else. The chaos that would be created within the country as a result of him being charged is probably the single biggest reason it won't happen if it can in any fashion be avoided.
On the other hand, Hillary's travails are not necessarily over. FBI is stonewalling on releasing whatever quantity of her emails that have so far been recovered, but there are people going to court to force them to release them.
"Lock her up", may have been good politics for candidate Trump, but it is not good politics for a President Trump, and he knows it.
Tom Ligon wrote:
Diogenes wrote:
Did they have some sort of pro-Trump effect on the election? I don't see how they could.
He managed to get elected in spite of them.
So for this event in relation to the "Russians hacked the election" meme, i'll put you down as a "no."
Tom Ligon wrote:
All I can guess is that you can fool some of the people all of the time.
We can certainly agree on that, but probably with each of us having a different target group in mind.
Tom Ligon wrote:
Diogenes wrote: Such as? Tell me who these "good Americans" detest, because I'm at a loss to figure out from where you are getting this idea.
At this point, I think we're down to the underlying problem. Trump routinely has praise for enemies and attacks his allies, often viciously. If you don't understand that most Americans detest Putin, and are aghast that our President calls him a great leader whom he wants to get along with,
I actually don't think most normal Americans give much thought to Putin. Focusing on International affairs is usually the obsession of a small minority of Americans. I perceive most Americans caring about Domestic issues, especially surrounding the economic security of themselves and their families. Calling Putin a "great leader" is just Trump's technique for buttering up people with whom he might want to make some sort of deal in the future.
Flattery doesn't cost anything.
Tom Ligon wrote:
is dead set against anyone looking into Russian meddling,
Well I would have been too, once I realized that the entire issue is made up phony baloney plastic banana grade A bullsh*t which the Democrat media weapon keeps repeating over and over, though they have mostly shut up their lying mouths since several (not just "the Nation") liberal sources have concluded that the DNC wasn't hacked, and that it was an inside job. It makes the Seth Rich thing look even worse, and whether there is anything to the various reports that Seth Rich was the source for the Wikileaks dump is irrelevant. The "optics" look bad no matter how you look at it, and so the liberal social networking group known as "the media" have decided it is not in the best interest of their political allies to keep pushing the "Russians hacked the election" lie.
That's why "Charlottesville" became the new media meme/scandal. They badly wanted to get the "Russians hacked the election" meme off of the front pages and out of the minds of the public.
Tom Ligon wrote:
fires or threatens to fire anyone he thinks might not block it, manages to praise the LFT on the side as a great leader, then your judgement on this is entirely suspect by American standards. Pretty much in line with Russian standards.
Yes, i'm a secret Russian agent provocateur tovarisch!
What's an LFT?
Tom Ligon wrote:
I don't know if Putin tried to hack voting machines. It would be tricky, and probably impossible to do in more than a few limited jurisdictions. Trickier now in our area ... we are back to paper ballots, which are scanned by machine but can be stored and re-scanned if hacking is suspected. This is because of worries of electronic hacking, from whatever source, and are back to maintaining a paper trail. The all-electronic voting machines we just retired only served a couple of elections. Prior to that we used a mechanical type that maintained a backup record on a paper roll, and that type was introduced when I was in elementary school in the early 60's.
Every time I hear people going on about the "Russians Hacking the election!" all I can think of is
"Witch!"
Tom Ligon wrote:
There are other ways to influence an election besides hacking voting machines.
Absolutely. The most effective way of influencing elections is to have a trillion dollar broadcasting infrastructure monopoly that is controlled by one party. Then you can shape public opinion by how you cover things, and over time that translates into votes in the direction you want.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —